Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss) is a multi-institution research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), involving the universities of Padua, Florence, and Harvard. Its goal is to represent the architectural heritage of Venice’s lagoon through an interactive 3D web map, allowing users to explore the historic archipelago via a digital platform. Nowadays, this environment faces severe neglect, and many ancient settlements have largely disappeared. The VeNiss project retraces the history of these places over the past five hundred years, shedding light on the events that have shaped around thirty of the more than sixty islands that, over the centuries, have gradually lost their connection to the city centre. The creation of this semantic infrastructure on urban history is based on a complex, integrated process involving a diverse group of scholars, including architectural and art historians, as well as experts in digital surveying, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Building Information Modeling (BIM). This contribution describes the main steps used to produce three-dimensional models of the lagoon settlements and highlights the progressive integration of VR visualisation to ensure optimal collaboration among team members during the design and validation processes of BIM models.
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Vertical Dimension. The Virtual Reconstruction of the Rogers Lacy Hotel in Dallas
This paper investigates the unrealized Rogers Lacy Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Dallas in 1946 through historical research, digital reconstruction, and environmental simulation. Starting from original drawings, plans, sections, and perspective views, the authors develop a BIM-based three-dimensional model to analyze the architectural evolution of the project and its relationship with Wright’s broader ideas on skyscrapers and urban space. The study highlights how the design synthesized themes from earlier works such as St. Mark’s Tower, Price Tower, and the Romeo & Juliet windmill, while proposing an innovative glass curtainwall with translucent fiberglass insulation. The virtual reconstruction also places the building within the present-day urban context of Dallas and evaluates interior daylight performance through lighting simulations based on LEED-related criteria. Results show how digital modelling can reveal unresolved design inconsistencies, test hypothetical environmental behavior, and reassess an unbuilt project as a visionary contribution to twentieth-century vertical architecture.